MUSIC PREVIEW: Gov't Mule gets a kick out of coming to Boston

Saturday

Aug 9, 2014 at 7:15 AM

The band has a special relationship with Boston. It played here during its inaugural year, 1994, and Wednesday's show will be its 25th in the city proper, to say nothing of all the gigs it's played in nearby locales.

By Chad BerndtsonFor The Patriot Ledger

Gov’t Mule is often described as a blues-rock band, but its style has always been much more polyglot, feeding soul, R&B, funk, jazz and plenty of other flavors into a lattice of guitar pyrotechnics, textured keyboards and pummeling rhythms.

The great strength of this quartet, which returns to Boston’s Blue Hills Bank Pavilion on Wednesday, is that it can veer from psychedelic rock or straight Delta blues to spaced-out jazz fusion, or tender folk, or blue-eyed soul without losing coherence. When guitarist/singer Warren Haynes and his quartet are really going for it, their meaty originals slot comfortably alongside tunes by Son House, or Radiohead, or Steely Dan, or the Doors, or Nirvana, or Van Morrison – almost anything goes, it almost always makes sense and it’s often jammed with fiery gusto.

“The Mule is in a really good place, personally and chemistry-wise, and the band sounds tremendous,” Haynes told The Patriot Ledger. “Creatively we’re the best we’ve ever been. We’ve been promoting (new album) ‘Shout!’ since the end of last September and the songs go over extremely well with the audience, and we’re even starting to think about the next record. Plus we’ve got a bunch of cool live releases planned – DVDs, multi-CD packages – so, yeah, a lot of stuff going on.”

The Mule started humbly as an Allman Brothers Band side project but has long since carved out its own identity. It’s celebrating 20 years in 2014 and also its longest-running lineup – Haynes, drummer Matt Abts, keyboardist Danny Louis, bassist Jorgen Carlsson – since the original Mule trio of Haynes, Abts and the late Allen Woody on bass.

As Haynes readily admits, the band has a special relationship with Boston. It played here during its inaugural year, 1994, and Wednesday’s show will be its 25th in the city proper, to say nothing of all the gigs it’s played in nearby locales like Worcester, Providence, Cohasset, Hyannis and Northampton.

In fact, with the exception of when the Mule was on hiatus in 2011, it’s never skipped a Boston tour stop. Haynes and company played the Orpheum Theatre in the earlier part of the decade before graduating to the Pavilion, which it first headlined in 2005 and has played six times.

“Boston has always been a great town for us,” Haynes said. “I remember playing Mama Kin’s (in 1995) when Brad Whitford from Aerosmith played with us. And I remember even prior to Gov’t Mule sitting in with Ronnie Earl on a night I was there with my solo band. Always good sit-in opportunities, for one. But we’ve had so many great shows in Boston, it’s hard to even think of all of them.”

Gov’t Mule enjoyed some of its best-ever notices behind 2013’s eclectic “Shout!” and seems committed to keeping its set lists fresh and unpredictable. Along with the newer songs, well-worn Mule staples like “Blind Man in the Dark” and “Thorazine Shuffle,” for example, have sported fusiony jam segments in recent years, and the gospel-rocker “Soulshine” has lately been interpolating Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey.”

“In the markets we gravitate to more than others, we shake it up as much as possible,” Haynes said. “Sometimes we’ll even take staples out and not play them for a while – there was a period where we played ‘Soulshine’ maybe once out of every 10 shows. But we try to make it as different and interesting as possible for people that come for the first or the 10th or the 100th time.”

Even now, in his mid-50s and father of a toddler, Haynes keeps up his reputation as one of the music industry’s busiest players. He still turns up with Phil Lesh & Friends and other Grateful Dead-related projects – including the symphonic Jerry Garcia tribute that visited Boston in May – and is also planning solo albums.

“I have a lot of projects on the horizon,” he said. “My next solo record will be completely different than (2011’s R&B/soul-flavored) ‘Man in Motion,’ but there are just a lot of things I’ve really been wanting to do for a long time, like a more singer-songwriter-oriented record with acoustic instrumentation, and a traditional blues record, and maybe an instrumental jazz-influenced record. And who knows what the next Mule record’s going to sound like, just that it’ll be different from ‘Shout.’”

Haynes will have perhaps a bit more freedom in 2015. Of his major commitments, there’s the not-exactly-small matter of the Allman Brothers, which plans to end its current run in October following the announcement that both Haynes and fellow guitar god Derek Trucks would depart the band after this year.

Haynes, who had a strong hand in revitalizing the Allmans during two tours with the band in 1989-1997 and 2001 to the present, is ready to go out with a bang.

“We had been talking about this as a band for at least three years, and reached an agreement that the 45th anniversary year would be the right time to go out on a high note. We came up with a plan for how and we were planning accordingly,” Haynes said. “At some point, at least one person started getting cold feet, but we kept saying, no, this is the right thing. I feel it’s unfortunate that some of this has been misconstrued in the press, but at the end of the day, the band is going to do what we said we were going to do three years ago.”

Haynes hasn’t lost his appetite for adventure or the type of scheduling that would send lesser musicians running for an office job. When we talk, he’s in San Francisco planning for another run of Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration dates. Next week comes Boston, which is the Mule tour kickoff. Deeper into the Mule tour in September, he’ll fly to New York from the West Coast to play one show with the reunited Phil Lesh Quintet, and then the next day return west.

“It keeps me fresh and inspired, and I think I get to do what a lot of musicians would love to do if given the chance,” he said. “In my mind, this is always what I wanted to do. I never wanted to get stuck doing one thing. I loved so many different types of music and combinations of musicians and the inspiration that comes from all of that. I never wanted to be pigeonholed.”

The variety keeps Haynes going, even as so many of his own musical heroes pass on. One was blues legend Johnny Winter, who before his death July 16 was scheduled to play with Gov’t Mule during its Island Exodus festival in Jamaica early next year.

“He was one of my earliest guitar heroes and I learned a tremendous amount from him in my formative years,” Haynes said.

“He was a giant and he’ll be missed in so many ways, and I think some people who may have discovered him further down the line don’t realize the impact he had on the blues and on music in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I was a huge fan long before he was my friend. I’ve been so fortunate to play with so many of the great ones.”